Well, nuts. I totally forgot to mention that I’ll be interviewed on the radio show The Inner Side tonight at around 10:30 Central (US) time. They stream the show live, so go to the KPFT website and click the "Listen Live" picture in the upper right.
We’ll be dissing McCain over his dumb "overhead projector" nonsense.
Oh– I hear he’ll have some sort of biologist on before me. But I’ve never heard of him.
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating."
-- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising
DISCOVERmagazine.com: Latest Articles on Space DISCOVER Blogs: The Loom
October 9th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Sadly, I’m gonna miss it. Go get ‘em Phil!
October 9th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
“We’ll be dissing McCain over his dumb “overhead projector” nonsense.”
Now Phil, you known the more political you get, the dumber the advertising bots are going to think we are…
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v130/Sarafan/BAads.jpg
October 9th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
Oh, that is the biologist that got kicked out of Ben Stein’s award winning movie, isn’t he?
October 9th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Will there be a post-interview transcript / recording?
October 9th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Second a transcript/download
October 9th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
My wife just got her Discover magazine today (she gets it so she can talk ’science’ to me!). Guess what! A chart from the soon to be released “Death From the Skies” is in the book review section. Has anyone heard of this book?
Looks interesting.
October 9th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Oh cool! I sent them that chart for the review. Excellent, glad it’s there.
October 9th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Nice interview as always! Can’t wait to get my hands on your book once Amazon ships it to me. I’m really glad to see you guys talking about these topics that should really be influencing people’s opinions of these candidates. Unfortunately, very few of my fellow college classmates pay attention to the science or technology policies of the candidates. Many are voting for Obama simply because of the popularity but I wish they would dig into the issues more than glancing at overall topics or nothing at all.
October 9th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Since I grew up near Chicago, I am familiar with that elegant piece of equipment overhead projector.
The term overhead projector seems to be understating the capabilities of the Zeiss Mk VI in Adler Planetarium’s Sky Theater.
And for the record, folks. The Mk VI was installed in 1969. You can’t get parts for it anymore. I first saw the Mk VI in action in 1974-1975. It is a wonder to behold. The replacement is $5 million, but the Adler Planetarium has already collected $2 million through private donations.
Shame on John McCain.
October 9th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Argh! I tuned in JUST in time to hear him thank Drs. Meyers and Platt(!)
Please let someone have made an mp3!
October 9th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Great interview Phil “Plat”
October 9th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
MP3 courtesy a helpful Pharyngulite:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/10/lets_switch_to_radio.php#comment-1149744
October 9th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
@Funkopolis: Someone on pharyngula dug it up. http://archive.kpft.org/mp3/081009_223001inner.MP3
October 9th, 2008 at 11:33 pm
Aw man, that would have been 4:30 pm here in New Zealand. Any chance of a righteous mp3?
October 10th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Or just go to the station’s archive page and select “Thursday, October 9, 10:30 PM”. The interviews are preceded by some funny songs:
http://archive.kpft.org/
October 10th, 2008 at 5:22 am
“some sort of biologist, but I’ve never heard of him”
A mite self-centered, aren’t you, Phil?
I’ll bet he was saying, “some sort of astronomer on, but I’ve never heard of him.”
October 10th, 2008 at 5:52 am
@pcarini
Thanks for the link!!
Really a great interview and it was much fun to listen to it!!!
October 10th, 2008 at 6:44 am
” ’some sort of biologist, but I’ve never heard of him’
A mite self-centered, aren’t you, Phil?”
I can’t imagine why someone on a first-person blog would ever stoop to a disclosure like that!
I kid, I kid.
October 10th, 2008 at 7:11 am
You know you’ve said something stupid, when Stephen Colbert makes a joke about it on his show… Yes, the people of the US are indeed worried about the rising cost of planetarium projectors… Oh, BTW, did anyone notice that banks are dropping like flies?
October 10th, 2008 at 7:22 am
B.A.!!!1 Check it out.
http://ecoworldly.com/2008/10/07/scientists-discover-fish-in-act-of-evolution-in-africas-greatest-lake/
October 10th, 2008 at 7:50 am
That biologist you have never heard of- it’s not this guy by any chance is it?
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/07/31/religion_science/
October 10th, 2008 at 7:59 am
Toronto, many moons ago, lost their (”our” at the time, I have since moved…) planetarium and it was a hard pill to swallow. I, a a kid at the time coming to terms with my love of science and astronomy specifically, had to watch as my political leaders refused to help fund this place. I went on a school trip, then the seed started to grow….time lapse a few years later…void in the city’s educational possibilities. I, and I know a bunch of friends, would have gone each summer as we did to the museum (next door to it!!) but when you lose function such as this, it is hard to re-establish. Toronto is (forever?) at a loss of astronomical outreach for school kids.
Planetariums are concise places to learn and be “wowed”, I suffered for losing mine, and I hope we can work to not allow any more kids to lose their chance to see astonomy in this light, especially in places where the total star count on an average night is 3.
T
October 10th, 2008 at 8:45 am
PHIL:
QUOTE: “While we were working to eliminate these pork barrel earmarks he [Senator Obama, or “that one”] voted for nearly $1 billion in pork barrel earmark projects. Including $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?”
a) Obama’s sponsorship of the $3M earmark for the projector suggests he would vote for it. The fact he didn’t vote, in the scheme of exaggerations to which politicians are prone makes this less than trivial. To present this as a “lie” of any significance is really petty. By that standard one could argue that Obama’s omission to vote for this earmark indicates his ‘two-facedness’ willingness to say one thing & do another — he pretended to support the planetarium but when it counted he abandoned them for his own self-serving reasons. That’s what some blogs are saying & that’s a lot worse that McCain’s reporting of what was, by then, ancient history.
b) ANYBODY with a modicum of familiarity with how legislative process works could NEVER conclude from the above statement that the $3M projector earmark was actually voted for AND granted (authorized & appropriated). The statement is a partial report. Until a definitive statement is made regarding the actual outcome, only a neophyte (that’s well below a ‘political hack’) could or would extrapolate. Saying McCain lied because he said the funding was granted is itself a lie…or a conclusion developed from ignorance. As other’s have stated, one should stick to one’s area of expertise. Making amateur mistakes out of misunderstanding how something works & then attributing those mistakes to the other party only highlights one’s ignorance.
c) A Democratically-dominated Congress rejected the earmark. In an era when most concur that earmarks are out of control, that indicates the $3M planetarium earmark was generally considered egregious as the party rejected its own member’s sponsorship. You know this. McCain (more likely his staff) garbage-picked this earmark example from the legislative detritus. McCain then reported this bit of ancient history. That history, ending with McCain’s remarks, on this particular topic does not even begin to support the conclusion that McCain is “anti-science,” etc. There may be reasons for concluding that, but this earmark planetarium thing is definately not one of them.
d) The projector projects stars, etc. on the planetarium’s dome, which is located overhead — in layman’s terms that qualifies as an “overhead projector,” a fancy one to be sure, but still an “overhead projector.” I made an informal survey of some technically illiterate numbnuts that didn’t hear the debate or this subject & every single one immediately assumed the “overhead projector” was the sort of high-tech equipment it is — and that includes some people that never set foot inside a planetarium & couldn’t care less. This suggests one of two things: 1) this blog’s audience is really dumb to fall for this, or 2) the author is exaggerting a triviality to make build a really weak rationale for rejecting McCain (which in itself isn’t too swift, reasons follow).
And by the way–taking issue with the label “overhead projector” is beneath petty semantics & is no different than calling a Stradivarius violin a “fiddle” — which would infuriate a musician, but which would not confuse anybody. Get over it. If the ignorant & indifferent numbnuts get it, that aspect is NOT an issue. If the readers are confused by that, you might want to seriously consider if you really want to dumb-down your blog to that level as it ultimately reflects on you.
Making such weak attacks on McCain serve to strengthen him in some eyes (e.g. ‘if that’s the best attack you can come up with he can’t be that bad in this area’). There’s a lot of good reasons to attack him on science-related issues and picking this earmark planetarium thing as something substantive isn’t. In fact it maybe or is serving to reinforce McCain in the eyes of some of those that are still undecided. THAT group can still make or break the election (I did a somewhat detailed review of yesterday’s polling data & while Obama is projected to have a substantive electoral college win, digging underneath the numbers among different voting groups the same data shows McCain with a greater popular vote (though within the margin of error) — thus, the presentation of the polling data is skewed by the press to favor Obama and, other things being equal & remaining constant, and assuming the poll data is accurate, it is possible that Obama will win with a minority of the popular vote. Its also possible he’ll lose). This is a very tight race still.
My opinion, you need to be targeting those that are undecided–these are the make-or-break wildcards–and not those that already agree with your position (i.e. don’t waste your time “preaching to the choir,” that’s just cheap intellectual masturbation). Attack McCain on substantive issues–there are plenty of weak points. Mounting a weak attack on trivialities grounded in part in your ignorance speaks more about you & won’t change any opinions and may even have the opposite effect.
Here’s the comments from the earlier post for easy reference:
Well, shock of shocks — it turns out McCain’s characterization of this was all wrong. In fact, I would call it a lie. He knows it wasn’t for an overhead projector, a piece of classroom equipment that costs a couple of hundred dollars. That money was for Adler’s Zeiss Mark VI star projector: a venerable piece of precision fabricated equipment that projects the stars, constellations, and other objects inside the planetarium dome. Adler’s Zeiss is 40 years old, and desperately needs replacing. These machines are pricey, and replacing them difficult.
Adler needed money to do this. They asked local politicians, and eventually were able to get a request in a budget submitted by Obama. However, Obama never even voted on that budget, and Adler never got that money — thus making, again, McCain a liar.
October 10th, 2008 at 9:21 am
We’ll be dissing McCain over his dumb “overhead projector” nonsense.
Wow. Great. Still with the projector, huh? Who’s bringing the fiddle?
How about a discussion on how science and skepticism can help us avoid a global financial crisis in the future? You know… something relevant to the population at large?
October 10th, 2008 at 9:22 am
OT, but Phil, what’s going on with some of the comments on blog posts. On your other topic about McCain and his overhead projector comment, I tried to view the comments and got this:
This is the same thing that happened to one of the antivaxxer posts and the Ed Mitchell post that Michael Horn posted on. Do you have control over this, or is it censoring by Discover?
October 10th, 2008 at 9:43 am
Politics and prostitution: the two oldest professions and of those two, politics is the dirtiest.
It’s also something in which even chimps and gorillas indulge.
I doubt McCain agrees(personally) with most of what he’s said recently but this election is his last chance to score in the history books and he’ll do whatever the Repub. shills tell him to do. Too bad he didn’t win in 2000.
I know several bright people who are uncomfortable with Obama,(including my brother) mainly because they wonder who, in the back ground, are supporting him. One should note, Ted Kennedy represents one of the old guard power brokers. I’m sure there are more but I don’t know them. At least, Obama has the balls to say science is a valid human endeavor and evolution really is the way things work.
For that ALONE I support him,,,
GAry 7